Why is it that the word definitely seems to be the hardest word in the English vocabulary to spell.
Favorite spelling by far appears to be definately, but I have also seen deffienetly, defiantly, deffinitly and even dafiniteley.

Strangely, it seems that non-Anglo Americans do far better on this particular word.

I must say, if that is all that's getting on your nerves, this forum must be doing well indeed.

What can I say? The internet is largely a free fire zone for spelling and grammar. First, it inherited a tradition, left over from when saving characters counted, of shortening "you" to "u", and so forth. The fewer letters, the better.

Second, there is the informal nature of message boards that makes spelling mistakes allowable, where they would not be if we were submitting a letter to the editor.

Third, the close relative of message boards is real-time chat rooms, where mistakes are bound to be made and not corrected, as one person answers another and the conversation moves along rapidly. Also, such chat rooms put a premium on typing quickly, which encourges mistakes all the more. When people get inured to the spelling and grammar mistakes in chat rooms, it gets carried over to message boards and Emails.

The internet offers a huge opportunity for people of similar interests around the world to communicate and share their knowledge and interests. If spelling and grammar take a hit, so be it.

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Well, bad spelling in general get on my nerves. Sometimes I believe it's because I work as a C++ programmer. Every spelling error results in at best a compilation error, and at worst in a subtle malfunction. However, I've not noticed the same obsession with my colleagues (to put it mildly), so I guess I'm just somewhat retentive in the spelling area.

But it's not a general lack of spelling capability that I'm curious about right now, it's the almost pervasive misspelling of that particular word: definitely. Evidently I'm not the only one: A blog
Searching with Google gives

Definately: 2,670,000 hits

Deffinately: 61,900 hits

Deffinatelly: 1,150 hits

Definatly: 414,000 hits

Definatelly: 8,280

Deffinatly: 36,000 hits

Deffinatlly: 531 hits

Definitely: 24,100,00 hits

, so apparently it's misspelled 1 time out of 8.

To a lesser extent, I worry about toroid, which tends to become either torroid or torrid, the latter which gets me thinking about spam of an - ahem - explicit nature.

I am also guilty of purposely (sp?) words in ways not official santioned by the dictionary... things like thru instead of through ... words that are left over from older Anglo Saxon days when all the letters were pronouned (i still spell knife knife, and knight knight even thou the ks are now silent)

With little exception the worst spellers of English on this forum are native English speakers...

Yep definitely is a word I used to always spell definately (until I kept getting it corrected by my email spelling check) Once I realised the correct spelling I associated it with finite and then I was ok, though I did start noticing how many other people spelt it incorrectly as well.

I miss having a spell check on the forum, as I often misspell words even though I know the "rules" Most common mistakes I make are using double letters when I shouldn't , not using double letters when I should and using apostrophes when I shouldn't.

Probably gets on peoples nerves, but I don't worry when I see other people making spelling mistakes, because I make so many myself

Tony.

ps. Just for the record I thought I better spell check this post, I had Allways and mispell what did I say about double letters

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